Memory: It Was Then That the Fox Appeared

I tend not to link to the more social communities I belong to -- a few people who read this may have a sense of the reasons why. Today, though, I am going to embed a little audio clip.

This is from a group that is not Squidoo-affiliated, but has a core membership of Squidoo people. There is a writing network, and a weekly BlogTalkRadio show that generally has a guest. I do audio clips for the weekly show: One week, it was one of my short memoir pieces; one week it was flash fiction by our guest, but most often it is a public domain piece.

I looked in on the platform that the crew uses to send messages, and saw that this week would be a recap -- no guest -- and that my audio clip from The Little Prince would be replayed. "Sentimental," the message note, and I smiled.

I wasn't very pleased with that clip, as I don't really have character voices. After several attempts at the fox's voice in which I succeeded only in losing the emotion, I let the voice go. I didn't listen to the show the week it first aired. This time I did. Since it was liked enough to get a replay, I guess I shan't cringe.

Ah, but that is not why I am a bit nervous about sharing this on this bloggy woggy.

Listen to internet radio with Alex Crabtree on Blog Talk Radio

Reflection: The Time You Waste For Your Basil Plant

There is a basil plant. I think she has tamed me.

Let me say this: I do not have a green thumb. I have neglected plants in my time. I seldom have a plant at all except the summer basil -- and I have neglected summer basil before.

But this one... The basil plant and I live in a room with two windows facing the afternoon summer, in a city where even in the sun, the cloud cover often doesn't dissipitate until noon. I set the basil plant atop the dollhouse, so it can be right up by the window. Sometimes I move it around a bit in late afternoon, chasing patches of afternoon sun. I poke and stir at the soil to check tht is is very slightly moist.

Two days ago (the last really sunny warm afternoon) it got hot in that room. I couldn't work on the netbook -- on sunny afternoons I can't see the netbook. Closing the blinds wasn't an option as the basil plant thrives on sunny afternoons -- because a good afternoon photosynthesizing followed by a night recouping and rebuilding restores that basil's firm umbrella-like leaves, but it's quick to get droopy when conditions aren't favorable.)

What is it about this basil? It's simultaneously so vulnerable and so resilient -- but so, I imagine, are the others if I got to know them. This, though, is the basil plant I took pictures, this is the basil I wrote about... To echo The Little Prince, in herself, she is more important than all the other basil plants.

Postscript (a day later): Trader Joe's chucked their basil plants last week -- they weren't doing so well. I was thinking this morning -- looking at the rainy sky, at the droopy leaves -- that my basil plant wasn't going to make it more than a few days. But it looks so much better tonight -- and will likely look even better by morning. Today was actually a mostly cloudly day, but I realized that with the window open, I could set the plant directly on the sill with the rail of the day bed to hold it in place. There it sat except when the lowering sun sent some bright rays into the room and we chased them.

And now... nightfall. Goodnight, netbook. Goodnight, basil plant. And (outside the still open window) Goodnight moon.

Reflection: The Fox and the Roses

Sometimes human interaction -- mine -- does seem like something straight out of The Little Prince. Here and there there's a fox; here and there there's a rose... Oh, and there are are a lot of other roses, too, growing together: roses who may be beautiful in their own right, but to whom I have a tendency to say inside my mind,

"You are not at all like my rose... As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

"One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."

I may say it inside my mind... oh, but that doesn't mean I have never let that attitude seep out and show itself on the outside. There were times over the years when letting it show got me in some trouble.

I've been writing to a fox as of late. Some of my letters over the years to different people... well, they can be almost like blog posts. I may soon post excerpts from a letter to a fox. And the post may appear under this one (as I actually begun it before).

Photo Credit

Reflection: The Distance Between Obsessions

I've talked so much now about how it is that all my life people have misinterpreted the reasons for my own actions. Well, I'm partly to blame for that, and I'm not the only one who has mis-authored their own life. How many of us have hidden our motives and the inner workings of our clockwork, not just from our friends and acquaintances, but from the doctors who would prescribe treatment? We do it out of fear.

Think about this: As long as people see my obsessions as primarily fear-driven, as avoidant or away obsessions, they at least won't be frightened of me Nobody's frightened of such a mousy person -- and so there are times I've wanted to cast myself as the 'mousy person'. At the moment people see the toward in my obsessions... well, do you know how often across decades of my life that I've been afraid of people seeing me as scary. See, you will find heroes, yes, but also some dangerous people in that population of people who are driven single-mindedly by their own obsessions.

There is fear in me, oh, yes, and that's art of why I am so compelled by 'the distance between obsessions' -- by the way the towards tower like mountains above the aways. There are things in my life I won't cross through just because someone is holding my hand... yet I will barrel through if there's something on the other side that drives me enough. I think it's less true that I'm plagued by unwanted obsession as that I'm dependent upon obsession and single-minded drive. That's surely a part of the reason that I have trouble seeing anything as truly desirable that I won't allow myself to be knocked down and smeared with blood over.

That picture of course depicts The Little Prince. I've always identified with the book and seen in it the positive side of a particular way of being. I've got some analysis of The Little Prince on Squidoo and it's done pretty well as of late.

credit: Musicienne, Flickr

Reflection: All Things, Strong and Fragile

That's my mother on a mule. She was a bilingual flight attendant in the years before I was born. I used her picture on a slide in the online class I taught last night; the particular slide was about which languages are supported by the knol platform. I'm not including the slide itself as a picture, even though it's in png form; it's a big file so it uses so much more space to host it. (If all my pictures were that size, it would still take about 500 posts to use up the picture hosting capacity Google has alloted me -- ah but, like most things I do, I am in this for the very long haul!)

The 'CLEP channel' will be launched next week on a particular e-learning platform. There are six of us -- two in the US, two in the UK, one in Bolivia and one in India -- holed up with our computers, writing CLEP prep syllabi, each responsible for a subject, but collaborating by wiki... It's pleasant work. It always amazes me how so much of the world assumes that it's the unknown that causes anxiety. I experience very little fear of the unknown, and am pretty low, too, when it comes to performance-based anxiety. Oh no, it's the people I love that cause pain and fear, that turn me into the kind of glass ornament you see in kiosks before Christmas. Does that mean I don't want them in my life? Heavens, no! -- glass is beautiful, and some is priceless. Says The Little Prince: "You run the risk of tears when you let yourself be tamed". There are moments when it does behoove me to leave my phone off the hook while I concentrate on some "matter of consequence" (I take for granted that my performance will be high if I shut out all incoming news) but the phone will go back on soon.

The song that's playing in my head is "The Riddle" aka "There's a reason for..."

PS Just edited this -- The Little Prince discusses "matters of consequence" not "matters of nonsequence". (Then again...)

Reflection: Pearls Before Breakfast

The title of this post (Pearls Before Breakfast) connects to a human interest article of the same name. Joshua Bell, a 39-year-old virtuoso violinist and consummate performer, who routinely performs in concert halls where tickets sell for $100 or more, decided to try a brief stint as a street musician. The experiment was planned to the most minute of details: Bell took a taxi to the Metro to avoid possible harm to a violin that cost more than I'll make in a lifetime. So what did happen when he played? Most people hurried past him, some flipped quarters, only a few recognized that they were listening to a very talented professional. The performance was captured on video, and a number of witnesses were interviewed afterwards.

This experiment is obviously more scientific, but one of the themes reminds me a bit of a favorite passage from The Little Prince: I have serious reason to believe that the planet the little prince came from is Asteroid B-612. This asteroid has been sighted only once by telescope, in 1909 by a Turkish astronomer, who had then made a formal demonstration of his discovery at an International Astronomical Conference. But no one had believed him on account of the way he was dressed… Fortunately for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish dictator ordered his people... to wear European clothes. The astronomer repeated his demonstration in 1920, wearing a very elegant suit. And this time everyone believed him.

In-Between: Librivox Link

And I’ve got such a long way to go, just to make it to the border of Mexico/ So I ride, ride like the wind… Psss, wanna cross the border into Canada and... and, well, and record audio for The Little Prince? That particular book is not in the public domain in the US, but I hear it is in Canada! I'm not planning on going to Canada right exactly now, but I did put up a new link: Librivox. You can download public domain (think: old) books in MP3 format, or you can voice-record and upload old books yourself with just free software from Audacity. The Librivox slogan is 'acoustic liberation of books in the public domain': Gotta ride, ride like the wind, to be free again…

Reflection: Monotropism (1)

'Tropism' means leaning toward or away from a stimulus; 'mono' of course means one. Literally, monotropism means leaning toward (or away from) a single stimulus.

Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser, and Wendy Lawson suggest that people exist on a continuum ranging from polytropic (having many diffuse interests) to monotropism (having interests that are few, but intense). Those particular theorists posit that autistism occurs at the most montropic/attention-channeled end of the continuum.

I'm not autistic, but I do have monotropic...well, leanings. The Little Prince is a story the monotropic within me understands well. Of course the rose that the Little Prince has invested his time and tears in is unique in all the world (even if an ordinary passer-by thought it looked identical to 500 other roses). And of course one can find in a single rose or a single drop of water what they can't find in a garden or a well.